The “violent surprise” that taught Omar Sy a harsh lesson about Hollywood
French star Omar Sy is likely to be a busy man in 2026, thanks to season four of his hit show Lupin dropping on Netflix on January 1st, plus his involvement with the TV adaptation of Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction coming later in the year.
It was the 2010s when Sy began a rise to fame that took him from French TV sketch shows to international acclaim, starting off with The Intouchables, a buddy comedy about a paraplegic and his caregiver that saw him pick up several awards and became one of the highest-grossing French films of all time.
The international success of that movie propelled Sy into major movies, beginning with 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past alongside Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence. Sy played the role of the energy-absorbing superhero Bishop in the movie, but experienced a stomach-churning dose of reality when the movie’s Hollywood premiere rolled around.
Sy had only been in Los Angeles six months at the time and was heady with the excitement of landing the part in such a big-budget Marvel production. Convinced he was on the way to superstardom after years working away in France, he told reporters outside the event that his X-Men would be the best one ever before heading inside and taking his seat.
In a nightmare scenario, however, Sy realised with dawning horror that his character had been practically completely omitted from the final cut of the film, leaving him sheepishly admitting: “I’m super happy, I’m watching the film, and unh-unh-unh. Your boy’s not there.”
Sy later admitted that the element of his disappointment that hurt him most was that the studio involved hadn’t been in touch to let him know just how much his part had been reduced in the film, but said, “It was actually a good lesson. I learned what Hollywood is”.
“It was a violent surprise. But, at the same time, I laughed about it a lot.”
Omar Sy
The Frenchman wasn’t one to let an experience like that dictate the rest of his career, however, and quickly recovered to appear in dino-romp sequel Jurassic World the following year, before voicing ‘Hot Rod’ in 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight.
His real breakthrough came with Netflix’s ‘gentleman thief’ hit Lupin in 2021, adapted from the early 1900s books by Maurice Leblanc. The show quickly became one of the streaming giant’s most-watched non-English shows in history, with Sy’s performance in the lead role getting considerable acclaim, and the actor picking up a Golden Globe nomination after the first season.
Sy reprised his role from his earlier Jurassic Park film in 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion alongside Chris Pratt, which was an enormous hit at the box office, bringing in over $1bn and then starred in a film called The Killer, a remake of the 1989 John Woo action movie.
Aside from stepping back into Lupin’s shoes early next year, Sy has also been busy filming Dumas Diable Noir, a movie about the father of novelist Alexandre Dumas, who was a celebrated black general in the French Revolutionary Wars and nicknamed ‘The Black Devil’. Vincent Cassel will also appear in the movie, which is slated for release in 2027 and is helmed by Ladj Ly, the director who was Academy Award-nominated for the 2019 thriller Les Misérables.
